Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial: The seven scientists asked to testify for the defense standing in front of the Defense Mansion.

Description: Back row, left to right: Horatio Hackett Newman, Maynard Mayo
Metcalf, Fay-Cooper Cole, Jacob Goodale Lipman; Front row, left to
right: Winterton Conway Curtis, Wilbur A. Nelson, William Marion
Goldsmith. The Defense Mansion was a Victorian house where the defense
team and witnesses stayed during the trial. July 1925

Collection: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs - During 1925,
Watson Davis (1896-1967), Science Service managing editor, took
numerous photographs while covering the State of Tennessee v. John
Thomas Scopes trial as a reporter. In what was dubbed "The Trial
of the Century," Scopes was tried and convicted for violating a
state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. William
Jennings Bryan served on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow
defended Scopes. Almost eighty years later, the nitrate negatives,
including portraits of trial participants, and images from the trial
itself and significant places in Dayton, were discovered in archival
material donated to the Smithsonian by Science Service in 1971.
Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and
Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished
photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes "Monkey
Trial" in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005,
SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the
Smithsonian Women's Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the
images. All images belong to the Record Unit 7091: Science Service, Records, 1902-1965 collection of SIA. All photographs were taken by Watson Davis,
Managing Editor of Science Service, while he was in Dayton, Tennessee,
June 4-5, 1925, and July 10-22, 1925. LaFollette identified and dated
each of these images, and has published a new book highlighting these
and other images from the trial entitled, Reframing Scopes:
Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the
Century, University Press of Kansas, 2008.

One can't help but notice the absence of any sign of air-condioning units from these scenes. Looking at shots of men in long sleeves during a July trial in Dayton truly highlights the changes wrought on us in the last 83 years.

This is wonderful. And yet today we still fight the battle over and over again. Look at the states where the religious wingnuts are trying to puch Intelligent Design or Creation Theory as real science.